Planets of Adventure

Bless Jim Baen, who at times seems determined to reprint the entire
Golden Age midlist of SF. for he has given us a good thick anthology of
some of the best stories of Murray Leinster — a writer once counted
among science-fiction's reliable best, but since unfairly forgotten.

I come away from Planets of Adventure (pb, Baen 2002,
ISBN 0-7434-7162-8) with a renewed appreciation of something I have
long known. When John W. Campbell and Robert Heinlein invented modern
SF after 1938, Campbell perforce had to train a new crop of writers to
produce it. Very few writers with established careers were able to
meet Campbell's standards.

Murray Leinster (born Wil F. Jenkins) was one of a very few
exceptions — and one of only two (with Jack Williamson) who
actually managed to produce better work after Campbell than before
him, rather than merely imitating previous pulp successes on a grander
scale (as did, for example, the now-unreadable Edmond Hamilton and the
still-enjoyable E.E. "Doc" Smith).

For this alone Leinster deserves more attention from the historians
and critics of SF than he usually gets. I, personally, was ready to
rediscover him because I had fond childhood memories of reading his work
from the 1950s and early 1960s when it was not too difficult to find
in the used bookstores of ten years later.

One of my sentimental favorites was the Med Service
series, tales of a doctor making interstellar house calls to solve
ingeniously constructed medical puzzles. I was delighted when Baen
Books printed a Med Service omnibus a few months ago — but it is
after reading Planets of Adventure that I am truly
impressed with Leinster's achievement.

The first story, The Forgotten Planet is a fixup
novel assembled from three novellas, published respectively in 1920,
1921, and 1953. The rest of the stories were published in the decade
after 1947, the last quite coincidentally in the year I was born. In these
stories we get a fine view in miniature both of SF's pre-Campbellian past
and the most fertile period of the Campbellian Golden Age.

The first section of The Forgotten Planet, written
in 1920, is deeply primitive. It's a dark thalamic adventure of
regressed humans battling lethal fungi and giant insects in a fetid
alien ecology. The only touches we can recognize as SFnal are a
framing story Leinster added after the fact, in the early 1950s, which
make the humands descendents of a crashed starliner — in origin, the story
had been set on a far-future Earth. One feature of the original
repays notice; Leinster referred to climate change via a
carbon-dioxide greenhouse effect caused by burning fossil fuels. In
1920!

The end of The Forgotten Planet, as rewritten at
the beginning of the 1950s, reads very differently. The stranded
primitives, having struggled up on their own to barbarian status, are
accidentally rediscovered by interstellar civilization. This is not
merely a different story than Leinster had begun to write thirty
years earlier, it is written in a profoundly different way, suffused
with plucky optimism and cool efficiency. The protagonist, Burl,
began the action as a a Joseph-Campbellian mythic hero; he ends
it as the archetype of the John-Campbellian competent man, bestriding
both his own world and that of his advanced galactic kindred with an
ease that disconcerts the latter.

In the next section, The Planet Explorer, Leinster
demonstrates a flawless command of the Campbellian idiom. These
stories, written in 1955-56, are classic planetary-puzzle pieces of
the sort that filled the pages of Astounding magazine.
The protagonist solves life-threatening problems posed by conditions
on alien worlds. These were intelligent stories when they were
written and they're still intelligent today. One of them won a Hugo
in 1956. Aside from a slight stiffness in the language, they read
remarkably well.

And we're in for another surprise. The next story,
Anthropological Note, dates from 1957. In it, Leinster
captures perfectly the tone and style of the first post-Campbellian
wave in SF, the social-science SF of the mid-to-late 1950s and
pre-New-Wave 1960s. Truly this story could have been written by Fred
Pohl or C.M. Kornbluth. The wry tone, the anthropologizing, and the
not-so-subtle satirical edge are all there.

The story following that, Scrimshaw, is a creepy and
dark little mood piece that manages to anticipate the New Wave of the
mid-1960s by ten years. The rest of the anthology (Assignment
on Pasik, Regulations and The Skit-Tree
Planet) is mostly filler, workmanlike enough stuff from the
late 1940s obviously written to pay bills. These stories are still
readable, but of no special interest other than as a demonstration of
consistent competence.

And there you have it. In these stories Leinster manages, with so
little effort that you won't be aware of it unless you're looking, to
span four eras of SF and meet all their demands with unobtrusive
efficiency. I am unable to think of anyone else in the history of the
field who can quite match that.

This observation is more interesting because Leinster was
essentially a hack writer. Besides the SF, he churned out reams of
pulp fiction -- formulaic Westerns, hard-boiled detective stories,
jungle adventures — during a career that begain in 1917 and
ended only with his death in 1975. It appears that the last thing he
wrote was a Perry Rhodan novel which I have not read but
which almost certainly stank to high heaven.

His SF, though, was not mere hack-work, or at least not
usually mere hack-work. He was a genuine innovator in the
form who invented the parallel-world story in 1934 and the
first-contact story in 1945. It is impossible to read Leinster
without sensing that to him, constructing Campbellian puzzle stories
was a delight, and probably the closest approach to art for art's sake
that he ever allowed himself. Certainly in Exploration
Team, the story that won him the 1956 Hugo, one gets the sense
that Leinster is using the story to think through some issues that are
important to him — and they are not trivial issues, even
today.

But for all that he helped invent some of SF's central tropes,
Leinster never quite became an SF writer of the first rank. He was a
solid midlist presence — the comparisons that leap to mind are
his rough contemporaries James Schmitz and Ross Rocklynne. His novels
tended to be uninspired; his best work (including the genre-defining
First Contact and the hilarious and rather prescient
A Logic Named Joe) was in short-story form.

What Murray Leinster does show us is that SF was as liberating for him as
for his readers — that even a hack writer could take from SF the
challenge and the invitation to be intelligent, and give back
something a bit better than he might have written otherwise. I never
got to ask him, but I strongly suspect that Wil F. Jenkins would be
prefer to be remembered for the SF more than for anything else he
wrote.

posted by Eric at 2:03 PM

Wednesday, October 15, 2003

Toxic Christianity, Round Two:

So let's see if we have this straight: The head of the Anglican
Church is telling us that the wanton murder of thousands of innocent
people [by Palestinian terrorists] is a sign of "serious moral goals,"
while the liberation of millions [of Iraqis] from one of the world's
most vicious dictatorships is, as he has put it, "immoral and
illegal."

Is this really what Christianity is all about?

Well, since you asked...yes, indeed it is.

To understand why, you first have to confront what Dr. Rowan
Williams is actually doing. He is aligning himself with Islamic
terrorists against individual Christians and against the liberation of
Iraq from an Islamizing dictator by a predominantly Christian
nation.

Now, why would the head of the second most prestigious of all
Christian denominations do that? What is it in Christianity that
could make him so confident in the morality of this position? What is
it about the U.S.'s actions that make it so threatening?

A clue to the problem is that though the U.S. is demographically a
mostly Christian nation, the effect of U.S. cultural hegemony is a
secularizing one. American popular culture severs the bonds of fear
and ignorance that hold people unquestioningly to their ancestral
relgions. The American vision of each individual as an autonomous
being who derives his rights from his humanness, from the simple fact
of his capacity to assert them, is deadly antithetical to any
religious tradition that vests moral authority in a transcendant
God.

The Founding Fathers of the U.S. understood this antipathy full
well. The pro-forma nods towards the distant god of the Deists in the
Declaration of Independence and U.S. Consitution failed to conceal the
fact that the Founding Fathers were agnostics and atheists almost to a
man. As George Washington and John Adams explained to the Knights of
Malta in 1787 "The United States is in no way founded upon the
Christian religion". It could not have been so founded without a
fatal conflict with its aspiration to be a nation of freedom.

The Archbishop of Canterbury cannot be dismissed as a fringe figure
as some are (incorrectly) wont to do of Pat Robertson. His enmity
towards the U.S.'s anti-terror strategy, his willingness to line up
with Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden after no more than a pro-forma
disclaimer of terrorist means, proceeds directly from this fundamental
conflict. It is diagnostic of a deep sickness, an abiding evil in the
heart of Christianity itself — the exaltation of obedience, the
denial that humans can have any worth other than through the
condescension of God.

Nietzsche called this one correctly. Christianity, which purports
to be the religion of love, is only sporadically anything of the kind.
It is primarily a religion of slavery and submission. Christian
individualism, when it exists at all, is legitimized only by obedience
to God. In a Christian worldview there is always someone to be
obeyed, whether visible cleric or invisible Nobodaddy. You must
submit; the only argument is about to whom your obedience is owed, and
what humans under what circumstances may transmit the orders of God.
Without that sinew of obedience the entire world-view
disintegrates.

To a Christian cleric, a properly terrified and obedient Muslim is
less of a threat than a person who has rejected the God of the
Abrahamic faiths. The Muslim is still within the system of
submission. Only a handful of symbols separate him from the Christian;
the basic program is the same. Therefore, from the point of view of
the operators of the religious obedience machine that is Anglicanism
(or almost any other Christian denomination) Osama bin Laden is a more
natural ally than any freethinker.

Am I accusing Dr. Rowan Williams of being part of a conscious
totalitarian conspiracy? No; he is something far more dangerous
— a leading figure in an unconscious totalitarian
conspiracy, one which denies its own nature just effectively enough to
fool others as well. That conspiracy encompasses every tyrant
who has ever told human beings that their path to happiness lay
in the exaltation of some authority, whether God or the State.

It is in this context that Dr. Williams's statement makes perfect
and consistent sense. For him, better a thousand terrorist acts than
even one human being waking up to discover that he need not after all
fear the wrath of God.

posted by Eric at 1:47 PM

Monday, October 13, 2003

Mohammed was a Christian?

In a recent blog entry I mentioned that Islam appears to have begun life
as a mildly schismatic Christian sect. In the comments on that entry someone
called for sources. Here is what I know about this:

(First, a note on my general background: I am neither a Christian
nor a Moslem, and in fact consider those two religions #3 and #4 in
the Most Toxic Ideologies Of All Time sweepstakes, after Communism and
Naziism. I have therefore studied the history of Christianity and
Islam fairly closely, basically on the know-your-enemies principle.)

There is a scholar somewhere in Germany using the alias Christoph
Luxenberg. He has published a book called Die syro-aramaeische
Lesart des Koran; Ein Beitrag zur Entschlüsselung der
Quränsprache. He uses a pseudonym because he thinks many
Moslems will want to kill him when they find out about it. In this
he is undoubtedly correct.

What Luxenberg has done is applied the same methods of philology
and linguistics to the Qur'an that were applied to the Christian Bible
beginning in the mid-19th century. I have not read the book itself as
I have no German, but when I read several summaries of its conclusions
I was struck by the sense they made of some odd facts I had picked up
over the years. Such as the datum that there is a Christian monastery
in the Sinai which received a special immunity, apparently from
Mohammed himself, under terms its abbots have kept mum about for 1400
years. And the curious resemblance (you have to have read both the
Qur'an and some odd Christian sources to notice, but I have) between
the rhetoric of the Qur'an and that of a now-forgotten group of
Christian 'heretics' called Monophysites who were particularly strong
in the Syria and Arabia of Mohammed's time. And the fact that early
Muslims knelt to pray towards Jerusalem, not Mecca.

You can read this
scholarly review for more. Another discussion, which was written
before Luxenberg but is particularly telling on the evidence that Islam
did not emerge as a separate faith until well after Mohammed's death,
is at this
atheist site. I'll give you a summary of the high points, some of
which the reviewers (though not the atheists) tiptoe around.

Islam, the Qur'an, and classical Arabic all formed in a
cosmopolitan culture of Syrio-Aramaic-speaking Arabs. The religious
tradition that went with that language was Christian; in fact, the
very word "Qur'an" probably derived from "queryana", a Syrio-Aramaic
term for a kind of Christian liturgical text. The variant spelling
"qur'an" for that word is attested.

Mohammed was probably a Christian of a Nestorian or Monophysite
stripe, and the Qur'an originally intended as a commentary or gloss on
the Syriac recension of the Christian Bible. The surah or section of
the Qur'an that Moslems believe is the oldest contains an exhortation
to take the Christian Eucharist.

In fact, it is almost certain that the concept of an Islamic
identity separate from Syriac Christianity did not develop in
Mohammed's lifetime; there are hints that it was a political creation
of the Caliphate, constructed soon after Mohammed's death by the
Caliph 'Othman. Notably, he had burned all recensions of the sayings
of Mohammed other than the one prepared under his control.

Many textual difficulties in the Qur'an vanish once it is realized
that a lot of the words in it are fossilized Aramaic. Luxenberg
wanders deep into technical philology here and you have to know a lot
of details about early Semitic writing systems, including the fact
that they didn't record vowels. (I know enough to smell that
Luxenberg has a hell of a strong case.) But the upshot is that you
can go to Syrio-Aramaic vocabularies and extract clear readings from
many passages that are maddeningly obscure if you're running under the
assumption that they are written in the vocabulary of later
Arabic.

Remember the brief rash of news stories about "72 virgins" actually
meaning "72 white grapes"? That was Luxenberg reading the Qur'an in
its original Syrio-Aramaic-derived vocabulary.

Islamic scholars of the Qur'an lost the knowledge of the Qur'an's
Aramaic origins shortly after 'Othman's book-burning. There are hints
of it in the oldest hadith (traditional saying of Mohammed) but the
hints don't make any sense until you do the philology, at which point
they snap into focus and startle the crap out of you. The traditional
Islamic accounts of the Qur'an's origins are are best confused, and at
worst pure inventions of the Umaiyyad propaganda machine that was
busily turning Mohammed's reform of Syriac Christianity into a new
religion as the basis for empire

One entertaining detail I didn't discover until I did my
fact-checking for this essay is that Catholic theologians have been
claiming Mohammed was a renegade Nestorian, or something like, for
about a thousand years. It also turns out that there are
scholar-priests in odd corners of the Christian world (notably among
Maronites in Lebanon) who had pieces of Luxenberg's exegesis all
along, but lacked the philological training to put them together.
Now it turns out they were right. Who knew?